French History - Advance Access

The Paul Doumer Assassination and the Russian Diaspora in Interwar France

Foshko, K. — 2009-06-25

The assassination of French President Paul Doumer by the deranged Russian émigré Pavel Gorgulov in May 1932 has been largely dismissed by scholars as a colourful episode of limited historical import. On the basis of extensive new archival evidence, this article re-examines the aftermath of the crime through the lens of France's relations with Russian émigrés, the country's ‘model’ immigrant group of the interwar years. The émigrés were as economically deprived as many other immigrant groups during this period. Their special status manifested itself in their relatively privileged legal situation, their reputation for political reliability and, most visibly, their prominence in French popular culture. This article argues that, given the anti-immigrant attitudes that prevailed in the early 1930s, this special status in part explains the surprising moderation of the French reaction to the assassination. Simultaneously, the article delves into the panicked reaction to the event on the part of the émigrés themselves, a group who increasingly felt the vagaries of the deteriorating economic environment and for whom the assassination was both a marker of their gradual loss of status and an important impetus to assimilation. The Gorgulov affair thus sheds light on both the French capacity for selectively assimilating some of its immigrant groups—a topic as timely today as in the years of the French ‘second wave’ immigration—and on the Russian émigrés’ own, often conflicting, sense of how far they had come on the road to acceptance by the early 1930s.

Wine, Friends and Royalist Popular Politics: Legitimist Associations in Mid-Nineteenth-Century France

Rulof, B. — 2009-06-16

Legitimism in nineteenth-century France did not simply take the form of a movement that sought to advance the cause of the Bourbons through associations and social activity. In the middle years of the century, it engaged with the new force of universal suffrage and attempted to harness elections for the creation of new political activities. Democracy could be experimented with for reactionary aims. In this case-study of royalist associations in Montpellier, the activities of legitimist politicians are shown to have evolved, from an important but little-known phase of engagement with democratic politics, to a retreat, later in the Third Republic, into social activism.

Brittany 1750-1950. The Invisible Nation * Brittany. A Concise History

Carrol, A. — 2009-01-13